Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Interview with Rosamund Hodge, author of Cruel Beauty

I am
thrilled to welcome to the Inkpot Rosamund Hodge, whose debut YA fantasy CRUEL BEAUTY was
released earlier this year. I am completely in love with this spectacular book.
If you like fairy tale retellings, complicated heroines, unique
worldbuilding, or tough romances, this book is for you. (Even if you don't, it
might still be for you. It's that good!)

Cruel Beauty read to me like a re-telling mash-up of Bluebeard, Persephone, and
possibly some other fairy tales as well. Did you plan it that way? If so, which
legend was the spark that started the story?

Oh,
yes, the mash-up was completely intentional—crazy potpourri is one of my
favorite styles of writing—and the spark was realizing how some of the legends
were connected.

True
confession time: when I was a child, I actually was not a big fan of Beauty and
the Beast. I liked it just fine, but it felt like nothing special to me.
(Heresy, I know.) What I did love was the Greco-Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche.
Briefly—an oracle tells the king he has to sacrifice his daughter to a
“monster.” But the daughter, Psyche, isn’t devoured by a beast as she expects;
instead, the wind carries her to a strange palace with invisible servants who
tell her that she is a bride. And every night her husband comes to visit
her—but he forbids her to see his face. When her jealous sisters persuade her
light a candle anyway, she discovers that he’s Cupid, the god of love. But
because she broke his command, he becomes a prisoner of his mother Venus, and
Psyche must complete a series of impossible tasks—ultimately going to the Underworld—in
order to free him.

As much
as I loved the story of Cupid and Psyche, I never planned to write a retelling
of it. In a way, it felt too perfect: what could I add? Then a few years ago, I
read the fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which is basically a
half-and-half mix of Beauty and the Beast with Cupid and Psyche. (The girl
marries a polar bear, who turns out to be an enchanted prince trying to escape
the princess of trolls.) Suddenly I realized that all three stories were thesamestory, working itself out in different
ways. That was when Beauty and the Beast became truly interesting to me, and
that was the birth of Cruel Beauty.

I
didn't even realize East of the Sun, West of the Moon was in there! That's
another of my favorite fairy tales.

The
world-building in Cruel Beauty is really unique (side note: seriously,
everyone, you will not find anything like it anywhere). Its basis, though, is
ancient Greece. How did you decide to base your world there? What kind of
research did you do?

This is
going to sound terrible, but I didn’t actually do much research. That’s because
the world-building in Cruel Beauty isn’t intellectual so much as aesthetic.
It’s an alternate Earth, but it isn’t the kind has a rigorously worked-out
alternate history (like in Kate Elliot’s marvellous Cold Magic, for instance).
Instead, the purpose of the world-building is to provide an appropriate
atmosphere for the story.

I knew
the world had to be vaguely Greco-Roman, because of the Cupid and Psyche
elements. But I also knew that it had to be vaguely Victorian, because Cruel
Beauty is a mad, passionate melodrama, and you can’t do that properly without
corsets and brooding Victorian houses. So I just threw all those elements in a
blender. My “research” was basically a core dump of all the Greco-Roman
material I had absorbed through a childhood obsession with mythology and a high
school/college career that spent a lot of time on the Classics.

It
doesn't sound terrible at all - it sounds refreshing! I tend to agree that the
primary purpose of world-building is to serve the story. (And by the way, I've
heard Megan Whalen Turner say more or less the same thing...)

I
absolutely love your fierce main character. How did you manage to write a
character simultaneously so full of hatred and so likable?

That’s
kind of a funny question to me, because when I was writing Cruel Beauty, I
actually tried very hard not to make Nyx too likable, and I ended up breaking
my original outline to do it! But I did still want her to be sympathetic, and I
guess the main thing I did was try to make her aware of when she was being
hateful. I ended up drawing a lot on my own teenaged experience when writing
her. I had a very happy childhood and my parents hardly ever sold me to demon
princes. But I did have a bad temper, so I had a lot of experience with being
furious while knowing I had norightto be furious. Back then, I would have
loved to read about a heroine who struggled with her anger the way I did. So I
tried to create that with Nyx.

I think
you did a great job. I also love the character of the sister, especially the
way my perception of her changed throughout the novel. Any insight into her?

I have
issues with the “sweet young innocent” character archetype. It used to be that
a lot of authors and readers idolized them because they were too preciously
good for this world. (Think of almost any 19th century novel.) Now a lot of
authors and readers seem to hate them because they’re too stupid and weak for
this world. (Think of how most people talk about Fanny Price in Mansfield
Park.)

I
dislike both approaches, because they both assume that being innocent and kind
means you have no interior life. You’re just a symbol, either of purity or
stupidity, and either way you’re not a person. And that’s pernicious nonsense.
Being innocent and sheltered does not make you less of a person. It also
doesn’t mean you escaped psychological damage, or that you have no capacity for
darkness.

So when
I wrote Nyx’s sister Astraia, I wanted to create a character who was not only
innocent in many ways, but who had been treated by her family as the precious,
sacred innocent to be preserved at all costs—and who had been damaged by that
protection almost as much as Nyx was damaged by trying to give it.

Finally,
I know you're working on a new book -- are there any hints about it you can
share?

The new
book is called Crimson Bound, and I just finished edits on it last week! It’s
not connected to Cruel Beauty at all, except that it’s another fairy tale
fusion. In this case, it’s inspired by Little Red Riding Hood and The Girl With
No Hands. The heroine is a girl who trained all her life to fight the dark
magic overtaking her world, only to end up bound to it instead. Then she gets
one last chance to fight back.

This is the kind of book where, when I'm finished, I immediately want to run and get the next book by the author. Sadly, this is her only book so far, so I suppose I'll have to be patient and wait for her next. She's a promising voice in YA fantasy fiction, and I'm very eager to read more works by her.Top rated Indianapolis Health Insurance